Some rather interesting changes are headed for Twitter search according to Cnet’s Rafe Needleman and Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram.

Jayaram, formerly the VP of Search Quality for Google, broke the news that Twitter Search will begin to start crawling the links which are posted in tweets and index the content of those pages. Instead of simply indexing the tweets of its users, Twitter Search will now offer search technology which will transform it into more of an open window of the live conversations and real time indexing which is happening within the Twitter community.

Twitter Search will also be getting a reputation ranking system, which Needleman reports will take into account the reputation of the user who actually wrote the tweet, and rank its search results based upon that reputation. There is no news yet however how this reputation will be calculated.

Perhaps such a ranking system could be built upon trust factors and influence. In a similar fashion that Google has always counted links as a system of relevance and popularity, maybe retweets and follower relationships and interaction will influence user reputation.

The end result, Twitter harnesses its search capabilities and almost instant ability to not only index a brand new web page or document, but also determine a relevancy and reputation ranking will give the company outstanding leverage in further valuing itself AND even licensing out its technology with search partners in the future.